I write and speak about technology's impact on business and life in books, for Forbes and occasionally for business. I'm author of five books including Age of Context and Naked Conversations and am currently researching a book with the working title of The We Economy: How Technology Gives Everyone a Better Shot. Pitch me by email: ShelIsrael1@gmail.com.

The Importance of Facebook's Graph Search

I have not exactly been a Facebook fanboy over the years. That may well have changed yesterday with the announcement of Facebook’s Graph Search, which seems to address two of my fundamental concerns with the world’s most popular online site.

First, until yesterday, I saw no compelling reason why people needed to stay at Facebook. We are there because our friends are there. We are there because we can get deals by liking a brand. We are there because it is the state of social networking today. These are not such compelling, defensible and sustainable features that they ensure we will not wander off.

Second, Facebook is a walled garden. It is a closed social network in a universe designed to be open. History has not been kind to closed systems and I have felt Facebook needed to open up or eventually people would just wander away as other amusements, innovations and marketing platforms popped up elsewhere.

The social graph has existed for some time, and it has made Facebook more knowledgeable about who we talk to and what we like than any other organization in history. But until yesterday, the social graph seemed more beneficial to marketers than to people.

Graph Search certainly benefits organizations, but it also has unique, valuable and sustainable advantage to the hundreds of millions of people using Facebook. Unlike what we do at Google, we can find people, places, photos and interests based on who we talk to on Facebook. This seems to me to be a better way to search for many things than the way Google does it.

More than that, Facebook knows more about our relationships today than anyone, while Google knows more about what we are looking for. The latter is valuable, but it seems to me less so than the former.

In yesterday’s announcement, Zuckerburg insisted Graph Search was inwardly focused; that it would not be competing with Google. I think in the short term that is the case, but over time Graph Search will show itself as a competitive threat to Google, LinkedIn, Match.com, Expedia, Amazon.com and anywhere else we go looking for people, leisure activities or information.

If I understand Graph Search right, then it really has no other way to go.

That would explain the partnership with Microsoft Bing. Bing is often overlooked, even though it has mustered 16.3 % of the search market, according to a Microsoft official. That’s enough to redirect nearly $2 billion advertising dollars a year, from Google’s till into Microsoft’s.

Bing may also be the road out of the Facebook walled garden. Bing, of course, crawls the entire web. Most users find search results to be as good as what they get from Google, but the photos are superb. In mobile apps, Bing is a visually wonderful search platform.

But if Graph Search is just about crawling Facebook, why does it need Bing? My guess is Facebook’s strategy will be to remove the walls of its garden slowly over time and give users results from all the sources on the worldwide web. As the biggest node of all the nodes in the Internet universe, Graph Search is at once extremely useful and valuable; as an open system using Bing to crawl the rest of the web, it will compete with just about everything and everywhere you search today, from Google and LinkedIn to Match.com, to books at Amazon.com and just about everywhere else.

This may not happen soon. It’s only my speculation, but it feels to me the door has finally been left open a crack.

As for me, I’m like just about everyone else that has been talking about this significant slice of news. I just can’t wait to start playing with my Graph Search. I expect I will be using Facebook more, not less, in the coming weeks, months and years.

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I dislike the fact that to use facebook graph search one must have a facebook account. You don’t need a Microsoft Live account to use Bing. You don’t need a gmail account to use Google.

This is not a fully capable social search engine, this is simply a feature for facebook users. Now, you may argue that facebook is in the business of making money so that is just their way of getting more users. If you ask me, in order for graph search to truly take off and change something about the way we search they need to not require facebook accounts to use it.

It will be an additional feature for searching specific things on net . We have Google, but there may be some features that will help search specific things like “music lovers in New York” or “SEO professionals in Canada”, etc.

Before we get carried away with how useful graph search is, we have to look at the relevance and meaning behind a “like” upon which graph search is heavily reliant.

You can buy likes on fiverr, kijiiji and craigslist to name a few. You don’t have to have experienced any of the things you have ‘liked’ – credibility, trust?? How many fake and multiple accounts are there on facebook for one real person?

Those two points are very important. If I search Django Unchained – the new Tarantino film and find out my friends have liked it, how does that translate to a recommendation for me to see it or suggest some review for the film??. Therein lies the limitations of the like button and the sudden propaganda of suggesting it’s more meaningful than it really is. I believe in review sites that have a meaningful validation systerm for the reviews. I know there’s no such thing right now but my company, @raveorbash is coming out with the solution later this year. I urge you all to think twice before swallowing this…

I think this will be an interesting tool, but it won’t replace Google search. This is meant to see what your friends like and do, get recommendations, and meet new people. It’s not about finding information, like what the largest river is, when a prior president’s birthday was, etc. It is a neat idea, but it won’t make people share more like Facebook is hoping.

Hi Shel, Great post. I particularly agree with your perspective on this is only the beginning of what is to come. Facebook is starting very small, but the long term implications are significant both for the consumer and marketers. For people, I agree that Facebook could very well displace YELP and TRIPADVISOR as a dominant force due to the sheer amount of data and penetration that it currently has. Furthermore, to date check-ins have been a very passive activity on Facebook. This ‘micro-referral’ for a local business appears for only a moment in friend’s news feeds, but imagine if it lived on indefinitely? This will be where both consumers will see benefit and local restaurants, hotels and salons will need to start getting a lot more proactive about encouraging engagement at their businesses in both a real-world and virtual manner. For more on this idea, I just wrote a post that explores 3 tips for how local businesses, such as hotels, resorts, restaurants, can dominate Facebook Graph Search as it rolls out. Check it our here: http://tent.to/hotelFBsearch Thanks for the great perspective. Cheers, Jeff

There is no competition of facebook and Google. Both are important as we use both in our day to day life. So It is just that comparing two friends with each other, both the friends are important then there is no point in comparing.